THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510080066
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NAVARRE BEACH, FLA. LENGTH: Long : 145 lines
Deployed to a barrier island that bore an ``eerie'' resemblance to the Sandbridge section of Virginia Beach, a disaster-response team from Hampton Roads spent Friday and Saturday picking its way, house by house, through the worst devastation wrought upon the Florida Gulf Coast by Hurricane Opal.
Working out of a compound of tents on the barrier island of Fort Walton Beach, and supported by National Guard troops driving military Humvee heavy vehicles, elements of the Virginia Task Force 2 Urban Search-and-Rescue Team crept across the waterfront neighborhoods. They searched for victims, shut down utilities and assessed the safety of the structures.
``This section,'' said Capt. Buddy Martinette of the Virginia Beach Fire Department, ``is a cross between Sandbridge and the North End of Virginia Beach. It's eerie, I'll tell you, walking these streets. It's very familiar and very eerie.''
Within easy view of the Gulf-front were a hotel complex with 4 feet of sand piled into its lobby level, cars and trucks that had been washed blocks inland, and vast fields of rubble. Small bodies of water lay where streets had been.
``There were dunes 15 to 20 feet high in front of these places, and they're just totally gone,'' said Virginia Beach Fire Capt. Mike Gurley, a rescue-squad leader. ``We don't even have that protection on the beach back home. We don't have 15-foot dunes to slow that surge down.''
At midday, after a morning of searching a vast condominium complex, the Virginia Task Force was asked to send a 20-member team to nearby Navarre Beach, a similar stretch of barrier island that Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles described as ``the worst I've seen'' in his tour of the Gulf Coast.
``It's major destruction,'' Chiles told reporters. ``It's sick.''
Two people reportedly tried to ride out the storm there, refusing evacuation. They had not been heard from.
At Navarre Beach, after doing a reconnaissance tour of a 4-mile residential strip with task force leaders and officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Buddy Martinette called the team together at the rear of a group of Humvees for a briefing.
``This is going to be dangerous work,'' he told them. ``The locals have been through, but they've only yelled into the structures, they've not been in them. We'll go into them wherever we can. If you can gain access safely, do so. If the place is locked up and looks secure, tag it and move on.
``Ninety percent of these buildings are beyond repair,'' he said. ``They're just going to have to be bulldozed. We have structures down there that are just flat pancaked, so be real, real, careful.''
Heading west along the beach in a convoy of Humvees and four-wheel-drive vehicles, the 20-odd members of the Virginia team were virtually the only people in sight. Local disaster-response officials sealed off the barrier islands after the storm hit Wednesday evening, and said it might be a week before residents could return to their homes.
Property owners responded in furor. They had seen only television footage of their homes, taken from swooping helicopters. In small boats and canoes, some homeowners tried to cross the half-mile of open water of Santa Rosa Sound, which is awash in debris. They were turned back by sheriff's deputies. One man paddled across on a surfboard.
Yielding to the pressure, authorities told property owners they would be escorted to the island Saturday. FEMA officials asked the Virginia search team to assess the safety of each residence during their sweep of the beach.
At the tip of the island, the team broke into three squads to begin a patrol of a beach neighborhood laid out in nearly a carbon-copy of the Sandbridge resort in Virginia Beach: a stretch of Gulf-front housing with two streets behind it, with a strip of homes roughly bisecting the island and a third strip along the sound with a view toward the mainland. The streets were gone. The storm surge had been so heavy that the Gulf of Mexico simply overwashed the island in many places. It would be the equivalent of waist-deep water on Sandfiddler Road in Sandbridge, one team member estimated.
``Whoa, look at this,'' a structural-engineering specialist said, inspecting one of the pilings that supported a large, ornate cottage. ``You can see, there, where ground level used to be. That is just unbelievable.''
Hurricane Opal essentially lowered the elevation of the Gulf-front portion of Navarre Island by a full 6 feet. Exterior light switches that had once been at elbow's height for an adult were now 10 feet in the air - the level of a basketball hoop. Pieces of what had been concrete driveways clung impossibly to pilings, 5 to 6 feet off the ground.
Some of the homes had been swept from their pilings, across the island and into the sound, or were simply reduced to piles of debris. Many others stood, like teetering tricksters on stilts, high off the newly leveled beach. Anything at ground level was destroyed.
At many homes, access stairs had been washed away, forcing the search teams to enter using ladders.
At other sites, mounds of rubble represented what had been homes. Handlers coaxed search dogs to sniff through the heaps, making certain no victims were buried below.
There were moments of humor. High on the deck of one home, a searcher found a pet cat and tried to coax it into his arms. The frightened cat opted for a 15-foot leap to the beach and shot off to the west. Walkie-talkie frequencies crackled with, ``Beware, very angry black-and-white cat headed your direction, estimated speed of 40 miles per hour.''
With the sun dropping behind them, the operation took on the look of a strange, moonscape military patrol, the searchers wearing combat boots, desert camouflage fatigues, backpacks of gear, bandannas and hard hats. Sweat-streaked and gulping water from canteens through the searing afternoon heat, they had moved methodically up the beach, securing 52 homes by dusk.
District Chief I.B. George of the Virginia Beach Fire Department helped coordinate the search with helicopter crews. Linking up with the search team at sunset, he estimated that they would have another 300 buildings to secure on Saturday - a full day's work.
Complicating the mission was the news that the residents would be flocking back to the island. Officials were pressing the Virginia team for assessments of the safety of each dwelling they had checked. A structural-engineering specialist objected: ``I don't know, there are liability problems with that. What if we tell somebody, `Yes, you can go in there,' and they go in and get hurt? Then they can come back on us and say we haven't warned them.''
Chief George said their response would be just what Martinette had told them earlier: ``Ninety percent of these homes are just not fit for anything but a bulldozer. That, basically, is going to be our assessment.''
At the head of the Navarre Beach causeway, in full darknessnow, George briefed the team as it prepared for its half-hour trip back to the base camp at Fort Walton Beach. A school had its power back, he said, and everybody could get a hot shower.
``What about dinner, Chief?'' a team member asked, wearily dumping his gear into a Humvee.
George puzzled on that for a moment. ``Dinner,'' he said, as if the word were new to his vocabulary. ``Gee, I don't know about dinner. I guess we'll find out when we get there.'' ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN CORBITT/Staff
SANDBRIDGE, VA.
A bulkhead near the 2900 block of Sandfiddler Road buckles during a
storm in November 1994. Sandbridge, which makes up the north end of
the Outer Banks, is vulnerable to passing storms.
NAVARRE BEACH, FLA.
The streets were gone. The storm surge had been so heavy that the
Gulf of Mexico simply overwashed the island in many places. It would
be the equivalent of waist deep water on Sandfiddler Road in
Sandbridge, one team member estimated.
COLOR PHOTOS BY MOTOYA NAKAMURA
Tidewater rescue team waits to inspect damaged homes on Navarre
Beach, Fla., on Friday.
Maps
KEYWORDS: HURRICANES HURRICANE OPAL FLORIDA by CNB